Educational Research

Initial Study of Emerging Features of Academic Philippine English among Freshmen in the University of the Philippines Baguio

Abstract

Maria Rosario Yumul-Florendo

This study investigates the possibility of adding to the codified features of standard Philippine English. Its primary objective is to compare and contrast the lexical and syntactic features of Gonzalez and Bautista’s (2000) Standard Philippine English with the innovative lexical and syntactic features of the Emerging Philippine Variety of English used by the University of the Philippines Baguio freshmenparticipants in their written output. Kachru’s World Englishes and Selinker’s Interlanguage were used as theoretical frameworks for the analyses of the data in this study. This is an innovative approach to the conventional Error Analysis (EA) studies used to analyze similar data. The frequency count of lexical and syntactic features shows that syntactic features were more distinct than lexical features recurring from those already codified by Gonzalez and Bautista (2000). However, the more obvious issue brought about by this study is what variety should be taught in the academe when local features are likewise widely acceptable? How far should the re-thinking of English teaching at the university level go to produce graduates equipped with a genuine global lingua franca which is English?